Paper arrived in March 2012 and managed to wow a lot of iPad users immediately with its beautiful design. The app enabled users to create digital watercolors, drawings paintings, journals, outlines and more on the relatively large screen of the iPad. It was chosen as the best iPad app of the year by Apple at the end of last year.

It has also been one of the top-grossing apps: it regularly appears in the top 10 iPad apps that bring in the most money.

To date, Paper has 80 million downloads and the company says 80 million projects have been created with the app.

“Since we launched Paper we’ve been profitable,” co-founder and CEO Georg Petschnigg told me. ”But for us this [funding] is about taking business to the next level.”

For FiftyThree, that next level is about adding to its 22-person team (that’s split about even among designers and engineers in offices in Seattle and New York City). It’s also about more than one app. Petschnigg foresees expanding to an entire suite of software, services and hardware.

FiftyThree’s team is actually full of veterans of the hardware industry — people who worked on projects like Microsoft’s Xbox, Kinect and Courier, as well as Sonos — so it will be interesting to see what they come up with. An obvious pairing with the app would be a Paper-branded stylus, but Petschnigg wouldn’t elaborate on what kind of hardware they have in mind — or when it will arrive.

“We’ve been focused on iPad there, but the next part we’re working on is services that will start to answer the question of how people work together and collaborate,” he added. Without giving any more detail, he seemed to imply that collaboration means among several different platforms, not just Apple’s tablet.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• How to stand out in the app development game

Wi-Fi is now one of the most essential services a hotel can provide apart from a bed, and yet poor internet connection is on the top 3 list of complaints from hotel guests around the world.

Nah! It is really my #1 complaint.

There was time when all of us road warriors walked around with a laptop and a phone (probably a Blackberry). Now we carry around a phone, a tablet (or a Kindle) and a laptop. I am guessing connected cameras are coming next and a slew of other gadgets with a built-in need for the network. And at the same time we are all going to be using cloud services for everything; listening to music, watching videos, working, buying and ordering food. In such a world, the network (both in terms of stability and quality) takes on greater importance.

The common refrain is — well let’s just use LTE. And while we all like to believe that LTE is the panacea to our networking woes, the fact remains that we still are heavily reliant and will be reliant on Wi-Fi, especially when on the go. According to ABI Research, there were a total of 4.9 million hotspots owned by carriers (including those run by the likes of Boingo and iPass) and the total number will hit about 6.3 million in 2016.

Of course, the place where one feels the pain most acutely is in the hotels — who in my opinion are the worst offenders in providing decent and generous connectivity. It is not as if they don’t have a way to quietly tuck in the charges into our room rates! As someone who spends a sizable amount of time on the road checking into random hotels, I can safely say that bad Wi-Fi is one of my biggest complaints.

According to Hotel Chatter’s 2013 Hotel WiFi Report:

• Nearly two-thirds of hotels offer some kind of free Wi-Fi. (It is hard to say if it really is free if the price of the hotel room goes up a few dollars a night and we don’t know about it.)
• The standard amount of bandwidth in a hotel with free Wi-Fi is usually about 1Mbps per each room. (I can categorically state that is not really true.)

It doesn’t matter if the hotels (or motels) are big or small. It doesn’t matter if they are in New York or Nashville, the fact of the matter is that both the quality of network connections and the bandwidth available on the network simply sucks. Even in the best of hotels one struggles to 500 Kbps to 600 Kbps. Try watching Netflix at that bandwidth, or in my case the MLB game! I guess our shifting media habits are killing the in-room video-on-demand business, a lucrative sideline for the hotel industry. (When I am in a really bad mood, I am likely to call it a nice racket!)

Sure, I can do some basic surfing and emails on this so-called free Wi-Fi, but that’s about it. And someone who needs to blog — and thus keep up with a whole slew of news and information sources when on the go — it is virtually impossible to use the Wi-Fi for even getting the work done. I almost always take the upgrade option, paying more for more bandwidth only to find that it still sucks. Unless these guys get their act together and build high-quality robust networks, they can’t really expect people to pay up.

For now, I almost always end up using the LTE network (if it is available.) But we are already starting to see that LTE networks are getting crowded and slower and slower. So it is not difficult to imagine things are going to get a lot worse for those of us dependent on-the-go internet.

Like I said — I love the connectivity in the hotels, I just hate the poor quality networks.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age

Bearing the rather clunky name of “Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers”, the app does require a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud service, but the fundamentals are present: you can use it to access, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on an iPad or iPhone — although the app is optimized for the iPhone 5, so don’t expect a tablet-friendly experience.

According to the product blurb:

“Documents look like the originals, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics and shapes. When you make quick edits or add comments to a document, the formatting and content remain intact.”

The app can be used on Office documents received as email attachments, or those stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro or SharePoint. If your desktop Office 2013 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud, you can also pull up documents that were recently viewed there, from your mobile device.

It is possible to edit documents while offline. The app is compatible with iPhone 4 and up, and with the 3rd generation iPad and up (and yes, with the iPad mini too). Devices have to run iOS 6.1 or later.

It doesn’t seem the rollout is global just yet, though. My iPad mini, which is set to the U.K. App Store, isn’t seeing it at the time of writing. No sign of an Android version, either.

UPDATE (5am PT): Microsoft has now published a blog post explaining the functionality in greater detail.

NOTE: This article originally bore the headline “Microsoft quietly pushes out Office for iPhone and iPad”. A few minutes after posting the “… and iPad” was excised because, while the app will work on iPads, it’s not optimized for them.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only player
• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015

It’s not the latest 4G-capable iPad that’s eating up all this data, though, it’s older 3G models: the iPad 2 and iPad 3 are now No. 6 and No. 7, respectively, on this list, says Actix; the rest are smartphones. There has never been a tablet, much less two, on the list of the most mobile data-hungry devices before. Actix gets this information from software it runs on the networks of eight carriers: one European, one Middle Eastern, two American and four based in the Asia Pacific region.

Why is this number suddenly growing just since the end of 2012, when the iPad 2 has been around since early 2011 and the iPad 3 since early 2012? Mobile broadband subscriptions grew 45 percent faster in the first three months of 2013 than a year earlier, according to a recently published study by Ericsson.

It could be customers are taking advantage of more flexible mobile plans, like the shared data plans AT&T and Verizon now offer. Rather than buy a separate subscription for their tablets, customers can attach to them to their smartphone plans, encouraging customers to connect their iPads to cellular networks instead of just relying on Wi-Fi connectivity.

But it could also be a sign of the continued popularity of Apple’s older model iPads. Though cellular models are more expensive, older models get sold at a discount. When the fourth-generation iPad debuted in late 2012, Apple started selling the 16GB iPad 2 + Cellular for $529 (down from the price of $629). The iPad 3, however, was discontinued.

Another thing propelling iPads up the list, Actix says, is that Apple’s tablets are consuming three times more mobile data than the average smartphone.

If this trend holds out, it could mean a windfall for carriers who can sell bigger buckets of data to tablet users, but the opposite could be true for consumers, who will end up footing those bills.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

Xie started the company a year ago with the idea of creating a line of toys based on characters she had imagined. She quickly realized that while toys seem like a great idea, what was needed was a brand new story telling experience for kids. She found that most of the kids-focused content on the iPad was simply re-purposed from books and television shows. It didn’t really leverage the amazing capabilities of the iPad.

So she raised $1.8 million from a whole lot of angels and seed funds (such as SV Angel; Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of Reddit; Gokul Rajaram, Head of Ads at Facebook and Brian Sugar, Founder of Sugar) and started building this new experience. It involved watching kids for hours playing with iPad and learning what made them happy. A lesson she learned and that all of us should remember:  These tablet native generation think of the screen in front of them differently.

With that knowledge, she and her team of six worked on this app which went live in the app store this morning. It is an experience so stunning and beautiful that even my jaded old eyes lit up and brought a smile to my face. And as Xie gave me a demo of Pan: The Fearless Beribolt in a New York coffee shop last week, I could feel the eyes of the collective coffee shop on us (or more likely on the screen.)

Just like comics and stories, it has characters – in this case a cute little Panda can Pan. Just like television shows it has episodes (it called them chapters) and it has memorable lines for kids to remember. If things go well, there will be future seasons (apps), and in the near future there’s even the possibility to license the characters to, well, those who make toys. But it has a lot more — it allows kids to use the iPad in the unique way only they do to explore the story. It allows them to shake, rattle and scroll and find new plots and new graphics. It has a cute photo camera that allows one  to take photos with your favorite character and share them with friends and family. They call it Pandagram, by the way.

Being old like I am, one thing I don’t know: will kids stay engaged, and is there enough story telling to keep them addicted to this little app? And if they do, can Xie and her team keep producing new content to keep those fickle toddlers from flipping to the next app?

That said, when I was watching the demo, I was thinking back to the early days of Angry Birds, which captured iPhone’s touch capabilities perfectly and became a phenomenon. This one  goes a step further, for this shows what future of kids entertainment looks like in the age of the tablet.

Just like we had television and computers, the babies today are going to think of tablet as their only screen that is relevant to them and touch as their default way to interact with the screens. I mean, sure, there are cartoons on television, but if kids are growing up with the iPad, then it is the only screen that matters and the idea of cartoons and story telling has to start from this baby screen and then extend to the big screen.

PS: I hope Disney corp-dev is paying attention. And I really hope Apple features these guys on their app store, for it is a great testimonial of the iPad’s capabilities.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

The study, which will be presented at the Audience Measurement 8.0 conference in New York next week, reveals that 82 percent of TV viewing on tablets happens at home. Office and workplace viewing is a distant second with 14 percent, and commuting, travel and other on-the-go situations don’t really make a dent at all.

Usage looks a bit different on mobile phones, where the office (23 percent) and transit (12 percent) play a much bigger role. But even these devices see 64 percent of video usage at home, according to the survey. Unsurprisingly, 90 percent of all viewing on TV devices happens in the home.

The study has a few other interesting data points:

• Mobile TV viewing is a still a small phenomenon. Even folks who do use their mobile devices to watch TV shows and movies only spend about seven percent of their TV time in front of the small screen.
• Mobility and cord cutting go hand in hand: 14 percent of people who watch TV on their mobile devices don’t have a pay TV subscription.
• Good news for Netflix: 54 percent of all tablet TV viewing happens through subscription services.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Here are the apps and devices I used that made my life a lot easier during this process.

Practice, practice, practice

One of the nice things about being the person everyone points to and says, “pick some songs” is, well, the songs I picked I already pretty much knew. However, there’s a huge difference between kinda knowing the song, and knowing it enough for a rehearsal. The first thing I did was create an iTunes playlist with the tunes. When I was driving around, I played nothing but those songs to get them stuck in my head.

When it came to actually putting my fingers to the fretboard, I used AmpliTube on my iPad for 90 percent of my practice — the other 10 percent were with my live rig to get the sounds right. One nice thing with AmpliTube is it will load the songs from my Music.app playlists and let me play along to them, as well as speed up and slow down parts. If there was a part I found particularly tricky to learn, I used Riffstation on OS X to loop that segment while I used the AmpliTube Orange amps to play along. For the first set of rehearsals, I also didn’t worry too much about getting the solos note-for-note, and instead focused on catching the feeling of the solo. I used my Fender Squire USB guitar for most of my practicing since it easily plugs into my iPad and Mac.

For what I was doing, I didn’t really care about my overall guitar sound; I just wanted to balance the volumes so I could hear both the song and my guitar equally. Then, I practiced. A lot.

Charting

I was asked by the bass player to chart the songs for a cheat sheet during rehearsal. While there are plenty of programs that will let you chart songs, I found them to be too advanced for my needs. What I really just needed to do was have the lyrics and then put the chord changes over it.

So, I used Pages ($19.99).

I went to a lyric website, cut and pasted the lyrics into Pages, and then added the chords and beat markers over the lyrics. This worked fantastically. In addition to giving the bass player a cheat cheat, I also had something I could reference during rehearsals. If I couldn’t remember how the chorus went, I had my own little cheat sheet. I printed out charts for her and the drummer, and had my iPad ready for my reference.

Running the rehearsal

Generally, I frown upon singers who use cheat sheets live, but in practice, obviously they are fine. Plus, I’m just filling in until we get a real singer (hopefully soon, I really can’t sing). I needed cheat sheets where I could see them while standing up, and I didn’t have a music stand that went that high. Plus, I wanted them right in my face.

For my cheat sheets, I used the iKlip 2 ($39.99) from IK Multimedia. It’s a mic stand holder for your iPad 2, 3 or 4 in a fairly secure fashion. Note: it slides into the holder, so I’d be a cautious using it during gigs. Not because it’ll fall out, but it’d be easy for someone to just snag the iPad during breaks. So, if you use it, make sure you take the iPad off when you walk off stage.

I was able to position my iPad with the iKlip so I could read the lyrics while warbling. A minor pet peeve is that I can’t get the iKlip to hold my iPad in the portrait position on the boom portion of the stand. Instead, I had to clip it on the main stand just under the boom.

If a note about how we played something came up, I just edited the Pages document with the note. Usually, this is how long the solos were, or if we wanted to change how a bridge went.

Final thoughts

I’ve written before about how I continue to be amazed at the way technology continues to improve how I approach music. It’s been 20 years since I’ve run a rehearsal. Back then it involved a lot of cassette tapes, CDs and photocopies. While OS X continues to be a starting point for my music, I find now when it comes to rehearsals, everything I need is on my iPad. I also have all my music theory and chord books in the Kindle app, so if I need to learn a chord I’m not familiar with, it’s very, very easy.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

It’s almost gospel in the mobile tech media and among mobile enthusiasts that Apple reports the actual number of iPads, iPhones (and Macs and iPods) it sells directly to consumers during each quarter in its earnings reports. Those numbers are often used disparagingly against other mobile companies when third-party market research firms like IDC report shipment estimates. Still, it’s difficult to get a totally accurate picture of the market; we’ve struggled with it here along with everyone else.

The most common interpretation is that Apple is being open about its shipment totals while its competitors are too shy or scared to share their actual sales numbers. The latter is partly true: Samsung and Amazon, for example, two of the most prominent Android device vendors, famously refuse to share either shipment or sales totals in their quarterly results. There are no legal requirements that companies do so. But that secrecy can be used to imply that Samsung or Microsoft or ZTE or whomever are “channel stuffing,” which is retail lingo for shipping a bunch of products to a distributor even if a business can’t or won’t sell them, just to make it look like there’s demand for its product.

But in this case, it’s not quite that simple.

Apple’s “sold” numbers are really its shipment numbers, according to several prominent financial analysts who obsessively follow every word and number that emerges from Cupertino. Horace Dediu, who writes the Asymco blog, told me that “Apple’s reports show shipments not sales.” He added, “All vendors as far as I know report shipment data since that is what they can record.” He has written about the nuances of what being “sold” actually means as well.

When is a sale a sale?

An Apple store in China.

An Apple spokesman pointed me to the company’s earnings statements. Here’s what it says about how it recognizes revenue from the sale of a product:

The Company recognizes revenue when persuasive evidence of an arrangement exists, delivery has occurred, the sales price is fixed or determinable, and collection is probable. Product is considered delivered to the customer once it has been shipped and title and risk of loss have been transferred. For most of the Company’s product sales, these criteria are met at the time the product is shipped. For online sales to individuals, for some sales to education customers in the U.S., and for certain other sales, the Company defers revenue until the customer receives the product because the Company retains a portion of the risk of loss on these sales during transit.

Apple is certainly different from companies like Samsung: it has a pretty enviable outlet through which to hawk its own products. There are a little over 400 Apple Stores worldwide and they, along with Apple’s own website, do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting Apple products in the hands of customers. And products sold through Apple’s retail channels are indeed products sold directly to customers.

But Apple doesn’t only sell direct: it has retail partners too. We’re talking about big companies like Best Buy, Walmart, Target, to name just a few, and mobile carriers worldwide. Note that in Apple’s most recent earnings release, it reported $5.2 billion in net sales through its retail channel, but about $38 billion in net sales through all of its geographic regions, which represent the location of customers when they purchased products.

When Apple says it sold 37.5 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads, as it did in its second fiscal quarter press release, this is often interpreted as Apple declaring that 37.5 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads have been purchased and are currently in purses, pockets, backpacks and briefcases somewhere. But Apple, as several financial analysts pointed out, reports something called “channel inventory too,” which it announces during those same earnings calls.

“Their reported numbers are ‘sell in,’” Toni Sacconaghi, research analyst who follows Apple for Bernstein & Co., said. That number includes product sales to retail partners. “They typically state during their earnings call how much channel inventory changed in the quarter, allowing one to compute to sell out units for both iPhone and iPad.”

The “channel” is its collection of retail partners, which have grown steadily over the years to include retail powerhouses like Walmart and Best Buy. Apple knows how many iPhones and iPads it sent to AT&T or to Best Buy — during the most recent earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted the company had “11.6 million iPhones in channel inventory, a sequential increase of about 1 million iPhones” during the quarter. Apple also said it had about “four to six weeks of channel inventory.” That means it takes about four to six weeks for its inventory going to retailers to sell out.

Making it count

But Apple has already marked those 11.6 million iPhones as “sold,” since the company has transfered the product to its retail partners, in this case the “customer” as outlined in the revenue recognition criteria above. Therefore, to understand the bigger picture of how Apple is doing versus its competition, it’s best to count those 37.5 million iPhones as “shipped:” Apple doesn’t technically know if all 11.6 million iPhones sold to retail partners have actually been sold to end users, and for the purposes of recording a sale, it doesn’t care.

Obviously Apple doesn’t want iPhones or iPads piling up on store shelves, and there is certainly no reason to believe that is actually happening. It’s a good indication to Apple whether those products sold based on how often the retailer partner reorders products. So while demand for Apple products remains pretty high, automatically assuming that Apple sold all 37.5 million iPhones to actual people during that three-month period is wrong.

It seems like a small thing, but it is important to keep in mind when evaluating the mobile market, especially as it matures and multiple sales channels are employed. In order to present the clearest possible picture of how demand for Apple’s products stands in relation to its competitors, we will be referring to Apple’s announced numbers as “shipped” from now on.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.